Now we're banning books about crayons

Efforts to ban books are on track to break a record for the second year in a row, according to an American Library Association report.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district in North Carolina has banned a children's picture book called “Red: A Crayon’s Story” for allegedly being inappropriate for children in kindergarten through fourth grade, raising the question of how old kids should be to appropriately be reading a picture book about crayons. The book was challenged using North Carolina’s recent “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” which requires that parents be notified “prior to any changes in the name or pronoun used for a student in school records or by school personnel” and bans any instruction on gender identity, sexual activity, or sexuality in kindergarten through fourth grade.

The book was in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools not as part of the core curriculum but as part of an agreement between the school district and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to provide Title IX content, Title IX being the law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools. So much for that.